The Enveloping Mist of "Fog Tropes"

Music can evoke a sense of place: a stormy moor, a crowded street, a hushed cathedral, a boiling ocean. But is it a kind of cheating to include actual taped sound effects in your sonic landscape rather than conjuring them with the available instruments? In the case of Ingram Marshall's seething, shimmering, bottomlessly mysterious "Fog Tropes"—a 1982 concert piece for a brass sextet he built over recordings he made (and manipulated) of San Francisco Bay foghorns, bird squawks, and other ambient sounds—I'm inclined not only to give him a pass but to hold it up as a model of compositional alchemy, somewhere on the fertile border between music and sound design. The result is a powerful act of conjuring into existence an artifact with the odd, unshakeable integrity of a found object. I don't think it's just the tape loops that give it that quality—with this piece I think Marshall tuned into some otherworldly, or inner-earthly, wavelength.

I first heard the piece on John Adams's great anthology American Elegies, where it both fit in and stood out sharply from a series of hauntingly strange and beautiful pieces by Adams, Charles Ives, and Morton Feldman. I then bought the earlier record that placed "Fog Tropes" in context alongside related works by Marshall, "Gradual Requiem" and "Gambuh," also conducted by Adams. I only realized recently that these are two separate renditions, and after comparing them I have to give the slight edge to the Elegies version, if I had to choose—it's a bit slower, grander, and with a greater dynamic range, from its quiet, almost offstage beginning to the shattering A-minor flat sixth chord that rings out around the 4-minute mark of the piece. (It's closer to 4:22 in the live recording above.)

A-minor is the piece's sort-of home key, as the Frisco foghorns on Marshall's tape loop emit a sonorous low A with a slight overtone of C, and there's a recurring figure—you couldn't call it a motif exactly—of a high C note bending down to a B, later to a B-flat (or A-sharp). Indeed if the piece can be said to have a harmonic progress, it is the slow, gradual layering of a latticework of accidentals over the drone-like A-minor skeleton of the piece—a C-sharp here, an G-sharp there—until it lands, finally, at glinting A-major-seventh chord in the last 30 seconds of the 10-minute piece. I hear it as this, more or less, give or take an octave:

It is a distinctively splintered yet somehow transcendent harmony, as if a new life has cracked open an egg and flown free.

But I've gotten ahead of myself a bit here. "Fog Tropes" isn't primarily about the harmony; its chords are not its primary content, really, and while there is a hood to look under here, as with any piece of music, the engine that drives this piece is more ineffable. For lack of a better word, this work's primary qualities are experiential. It puts you into a free-tempo seascape of the mind and holds you there, floating, a bit hypnotized, a bit disoriented, as a few bright images flame past with fierce clarity, like figures emerging from the fog. It is alternately spooky and reassuring, alienating and cozy; I'm not surprised to learn that Scorsese used a bit of it on the soundtrack of Shutter Island. Its sister pieces, "Gradual Requiem" and "Gambuh," have considerable virtues, though the leaping minor thirds and synth sounds of the former occasionally put me in mind of the incidental music for Tom Baker-era Doctor Who—not a terrible association in my book, but probably a kitschier effect than Marshall intended.

None come close to the impact of "Fog Tropes," about which that old cliché—that you catch something new in a beloved work each time you hear it—is truer than in any other piece I know. Its fragments of sound and harmony, so familiar to me by now, remain irreducibly and tinglingly strange, an ectoplasmic spray of mist that never fails to stick to me.

In my research for this piece I came across a revealing interview with Marshall, in which he talks about his work and its inspirations. It's worth reading in full, but one quote jumped out at me, not least because it recalled one I shared recently here from Colin Greenwood:

I never worship technology for itself. It's only a tool and one must avoid the pitfall of always wanting the newest, most up-to-date technology in order to realize one's music, because that perfect technology will never exist. It is better to use what you have, what you find at your disposal and make the best of it—then you are in charge.

This also puts into words one of the driving questions of my life:

I have always thought the hermeneutics of music (was) very important. What does music mean, what does it convey? What's behind it? Does it just mean itself?